Unschooling Journal March 10-16, 2019

The week started with searching for glass on the beach on Sunday and ended with another week full of activities and learning for Ethan.

March 10

On Sunday morning, we woke up to another amazingly sunny and beautiful day so we headed to the beach once again.

We looked for more broken glass along the beach.

Ethan suggested that we should try and fill up our big glass vase with the pieces of glass we find on the beach.

Ethan would find a piece of glass and make Dong Eun try to find it.

He found this heart shaped piece of seaweed.

Here’s the vase with the glass Ethan’s collected, so far.

As you can see, there are some miscellaneous items, including a guitar pick and a button, along with some rocks Ethan thought looked interesting.

Luca came over for a play date. This was the first time Luca had come over so Ethan was really excited.

They spent a couple of hours just experimenting with Universe Sandbox 2.

Dong Eun baked some chocolate and banana muffins that the boys loved. We all loved them, actually. Since we’re trying to watch how much sugar we eat, Dong Eun used very ripe bananas and only a little maple syrup, instead of regular sugar.

We played Blue Marble for most of the late afternoon and early evening.

Before heading to bed, Ethan did some music notation homework.

March 11

Ethan started the morning by continuing with his music notation homework.

He then drew cross sections of the galaxy all the way down to our home, the table and this drawing.

The image with the red is the sun. He’s colouring the earth in this photo.

He answered questions and word problems about triangles.

He worked on a program that calculates square roots. He added a mirror function so you can see yourself on screen.

He learned more about the Incas and then wrote about how the Incan Empire fell to Fransisco Pizarro in the 1530s.

Adding lines to his plain notebook to make a 3D drawing.

Ethan was on the NASA website and found this live mission status for Voyager I and II.

You can enter any number and the program will tell you the square root using a computer voice.

He took a little reading break.

And a little cubing break, too.

Break over. Time to make a chess board with what he called weird spaces.

He borrowed some felt pens of mine and used them quite extensively to write about salutations and valedictions. It looks like he had fun writing these.

He learned about the Canada Games.

He made a card for platinum.

We then read the feedback we got from Natasha, Ethan’s LC, and read the Wikipedia page about overlapping circles that she sent to Ethan.

He coloured in more of his diagram.

He then got to work making more overlapping circles.

We went out and got Ethan a new set of Stabilo felt pens and here’s one of the first things he drew.

Dong Eun used the new pens to colour in Ethan’s earlier overlapping circle pattern. They decided we would make special occasion cards using these types of patterns.

Natasha asked Ethan if he could solve for the area of the curved triangle that’s in the negative space of the overlapping circles. Ethan found out how to do that calculation tonight.

One card done!

March 12

Ethan began the morning working on a new overlapping circles pattern. He’s really enjoying his new felt pens, too.

We had my dad over for a birthday lunch so Ethan made him a card and wrote some facts about his grandpa’s age, 75.

The cake on the card has 75 candles to match grandpa’s age.

We couldn’t have done this if Ethan was in school.

After his grandparents went home, Ethan got back to work. He made an element card for gold.

He also made a video about overlapping circles.

Time for language arts and learning about using the apostrophe.

Selfie time.

60-second exercise challenge selfie while doing squats.

He learned about 3 hard geometry problems. The first was dividing a line into 6 equal parts.

The second problem was taking a squiggle and trying to find the smallest area for the two shapes. We didn’t get a photo of the third and Ethan couldn’t remember what it was.

He learned about run-on sentences and wrote a silly story using them.

At his violin lesson, he completed Musette and started learning Waltz. He didn’t do as well with his musical notation homework so he got a start on it right when he got home.

He learned about graphing shapes on the coordinate plane and taught it to us.

March 13

Happy to head off to nature school for the day.

Sad to leave nature school? Haha. Maybe but he was definitely tired and happy.

Once home, Ethan learned how to prove the Pythagorean theorem from Khan Academy.

He did some graphing practice, following up with what he learned yesterday.

He did some coding in Scratch.

He then listened to some podcasts, like Forever Ago, a podcast about history.

While listening to the podcasts, he worked on a landscape illustration using his new felt pens.

He said this wasn’t finished, yet.

This week at nature school, Ethan had a substitute teacher named Anna. Here’s what she emailed us…

Anna’s Group (subbing for Scott):

Today was all about group challenge and invention. We started out by walking to the place called ‘Eagle Island’. Along the way we observed the changes in snow/ice cover from the previous week, and what it told us about different parts of the forest- for example, slushy or dry areas that we now know receive more sun (or retain more heat) than icy areas. does this affect what type of plants grow there, for example?

When we arrived at the island we set ourselves up for our first group challenge: Flying Squirrels avoiding capture by a Spotted Owl (an old-growth forest specialist that relies on sound to locate their prey). Working as a team, the squirrels successfully made their way from one end of the forest with their food cache (a mixture of seeds and insects) to the other. Stealth and collaboration were key skills that were used to escape the owl’s keen listening ability and reach home safely.

In the next group challenge we found ourselves more puzzled, however. The simple task was to lower a 4ft long, lightweight branch to the ground with all five of us maintaining contact (with a single finger from below) the entire time. Surprisingly, this brought about some bewilderment and frustration! How was the stick floating up away from us instead of what we were aiming for!? Was someone pushing it upward? Or was it a combination of minute movements by all of us? Perhaps more trust in each other and fine-tuning of our motor skills could bring us future success in this actually very difficult task. And maybe it teaches us something about group dynamic, the way we are all contributors to what’s going on, all the time,whether we feel it or not.

After breaking for lunch we came together for our next group challenge- problem solving the simple query of how to pass a stick around our circle without using our hands (then only using our lower body, then only using one foot, then using only our heads). Some times we invented ways to make it easier, using our brains to problem solve within the parameters; other times we relied on sheer balance and focus.

We also played a round of Fire Keeper (another stealth challenge) and a game where Grizzly Bears raced against the clock to bring back food from their territory before a new highway blocked it’s access.

Everyone was keen to stay at the island for the last part of the day, so we invented new ways to make ice boats and then created “magic moving fir cones” with Douglas Fir cones and the fishing line that we found. This was also a great opportunity to remember what trees we shared the island with, based on the type of cones that were available to us (mostly Douglas Fir and Hemlock cones).

As we left the island we had the opportunity to skate our way back along sections of the path, meet other groups doing knots and camoflauge, and share a bit of our day with our friends.

Finally, at night…

We’ve continued to read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It’s a fun book with lots of colourful language to make us imagine what the characters are experiencing and seeing.

March 14

The day started with working on some math and learning about relations, lines and functions.

Some violin practice.

He answered comprehension questions about the Incas. He’s asking me to point out spelling errors nowadays, which is a big change.

He learned about the new Canada Food Guide.

He made 6 element cards today and is now up to 89, actinium.

He practiced playing chess online.

He learned some more chess moves that he wanted to try online.

And he taught us functions and how to validate them. I sometimes wonder if he really knows what he’s teaching us and I was pleasantly surprised today when he caught his own errors and could easily answer any questions we had.

Had to add this photo onto the end because it didn’t upload properly. If you rearrange the order of the photos after adding captions, the captions disappear!

Ethan said he was hot so Dong Eun helped him tie his hair up to cool down. He now wants a hair cut.

We finished the day by reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

March 15

Ethan continued learning about functions this morning.

He decided to answer the questions from the textbook by creating graphs and sticking them onto a piece of paper.

He imported some videos he made on my iPhone to his computer. He edited the videos about dry ice and how to calculate the area of the curved part of the triangles found in overlapping circles.

Time to water the neighbour’s plants and check her mail.

He learned about buddy benches today.

For history, he started learning about medieval India and wrote a short summary about what he learned.

He learned about dashes today and how to use them. He wrote a fun story using dashes as much as possible.

Today’s element was thorium.

Some violin practice.

Some cross-eye practice.

We were doing a bit of vacuuming and cleaning up. Ethan was reminded of the importance of keeping his thing neat and tidy. Here, they were reorganizing Ethan’s pens and felts.

We were having some toast for a snack and Ethan mentioned that he wanted a BLT. I told Ethan that a BLT is a very popular sandwich and he said the Elvis (peanut butter with bananas) was also popular. So we wanted to know if Ethan knew who Elvis was. He didn’t know so we Googled Elvis and talked about how his dancing was very controversial at the time. We watched Elvis’ dance moves on YouTube and compared them to the waltz.

March 16

Last day of skating lessons before Spring Break. He was hoping they’d do something fun.

Warming up.

Almost the entire lesson was playing games on the ice like this one. Each team tried to throw all their things to the other side. Whichever team could empty their own side would be the winner.

He made it to Level 3! Quite proud of him because he never took lessons before and jumped right into Level 2.

After skating, we went to the library to pick up a book.

Ethan finally wanted a haircut because he’s been complaining about being too hot when sleeping. The funny thing is that the stylist kept asking Dong Eun how she should cut Ethan’s hair because she was worried she was cutting off too much. Dong Eun eventually realized that the stylist thought that Ethan was a girl!

After we told her that he’s a boy, we all had a good laugh and she gave him a boy’s style haircut without needing to ask us much.

New haircut, old favourite snack. We went out to Richmond because my cousin was going to treat us for a sushi dinner. We were early so we did some shopping to find Ethan some new clothes.

We had an old favourite snack of mine, cocktail buns, and had a nice afternoon together.

After dinner, we did a bit of grocery shopping before heading home exhausted after a very busy Saturday.

After we got the felt pens for Ethan it was like opening up a new world of creativity for him because of all the colours. He also continued expanding his knowledge of math and did a great job with his writing, too.

I told a couple other parents about unschooling this past week, as I usually seem to end up doing. I hope to inspire other parents to look at the options available for their children.